Cool Mac Gear

New York City has one of the most photogenic cityscapes on the planet. Even folks who have never lived or visited there are likely to regard many Big Apple venues as familiar from seeing them in so many movies and TV shows over the years. Now you can have New York City vistas on your OS X monitor screen.

David Hanauer has compiled a wonderful OS X screensaver collection of NYC photographs that is free for the downloading.

Whether you are currently living in New York or just want to relive your time there (cinematic or actual), this collection of 25 color and black & white photographs will offer you the opportunity to reminisce about one of the greatest cities on Earth. All photos are of Manhattan and include the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue, Grand Central Terminal, various skyline views, and a large dose of Central Park.

To install this screen saver, you can use the included small installer program. This program can also be used to remove the slide show if you want. For the installer to work properly, the slide show will need to be in the same folder as the installer.

Alternatively, open either your Main or Home Library Folder and then open the "Screen Savers" folder. Then simply drag the file "New York City Screen Saver.slideSaver" to the "Screen Savers" folder. Your Main Library folder can be found at the main level of your hard drive and your Home Library folder can be found in your Home directory.

If you install the file in your Main folder it will be available to all users of the system (but you will need to be an "administrator" of the computer). If you install the file in your Home folder, it will be available only to you but no other users of the computer.

Once the file is installed you will need to go to your System Preferences and choose the "Screen Effects" preference. You should then be able to select the slide show.

If screensavers aren't you bag, you can also extract the images from the screensaver module to use as Desktop pictures.

Go to:

Macintosh HD (or your Home Folder, wherever the screensaver is installed) -> System -> Library -> Screen Savers

Then control-click on New York City Screen Saver.slideSaver and select "Show Package Contents" from the contextual menu. You'll find 25 NYC images in:

Contents -> Resources

in .jpg format

This screensaver is freeware and is only available for Macintosh OS X.

For more information, visit:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hanauer/NYC_Screensaver/index.html

re: OS X

From Benjamin Huot

I like OS X considerably better than any other system I've used so far. It is simple and elegant while still being super stable. I always had trouble with all the windows floating around and hard to switch between tasks in OS 8/9. I don't think OS 8/9 are any better fundamentally than Windows 95/98. I liked System 7 alright though. The Dock is very useful like KDEs Dock which I used first and liked a lot. I think a lot of the problems people are having with OS X is that they don't give it enough memory. I have 1 GB of RAM and it doesn't lock up on me at intensive computing times. Although sometimes it isn't that responsive.

On the iApps, I think they are great compliment to traditional illustrating and publishing programs. I can catalogue my illustrations and photos and turn them into standard web thumbnails and Quicktime slideshows. I think people who think they are going to get Apple to provide them free professional graphic design programs should look at the quality of those for Linux. I think it is smart to focus on what the common user wants for the OS and the more advanced users can buy additional software. If you want everything to be free good luck with Fink. For those willing to spend a modest amount of money on Photoshop Elements or Expression, they will be more pleased that Apple didn't spend all their money making design applications that weren't quite good enough so you have to buy another application anyway.

Ben
http://homepage.mac.com/bearyandbow

Thanks for your comments, Ben. Glad you find OS X to your liking.

Charles

Why NOT Switch?

From Judson

Charles,

"..roughly breaking along the lines of those who embraced it enthusiastically and were/are willing to excuse (and sometimes rationalize?) its shortcomings and angularities, and those who took a more critical "I'm from Missouri" approach to switching. "

Not very objective right from the outset. Truth be told many of us OSX users never even think about comparisons anymore. I've forgotten the OS altogether. I just work with no perceptible frustrations or slow downs. Our support calls for Mac users in our district have decreased by nearly 40% since the switch to OSX. If you want problems you'll almost always find them..

-Judson
http://www.blogforamerica.com/

Hi Judson;

I don't doubt that your support calls are down with OS X. People who make support calls are more often than not casual or novice users, for whom I have stated many times OS X is a better platform.

However, as an exclusive OS X user, you're still in a minority. The Mac installed base is estimated at 25-30 million, so with 7 million OS X users, that means only about one quarter are using the new system yet.

And I don't beat the bushes, so to speak, to find problems, let alone WANT them, with OS X. There are plenty that are manifestly evident, but I would be a lot happier if there weren't.

Charles

OSX Double Pumping

From C. J. Michelson

Charles,

You have mentioned OSX requires double pumping. For me this is annoyingly true when connecting to my dialup ISP. It requires 2, 3 or 4 tries to get a connection from both my iMac17" with 10.2.0 and an iBook 700 with 10.2.3

From home, on an iMac400 and OS 9.0.4, it never happens. Doesn't happen from a NEC notebook running Windows 95. Am I overlooking a setting or preference?

The little hesitations in OSX. It's like walking in waist deep water. Maybe that's why they call it Aqua.

Charlie M.

Hi Charlie;

If you're doing something wrong, I must be doing the same thing.

Enough other people have complained of erratic input device response in OS X that I think we can safely say its the system. I've sort of gotten used to it, but it's still damned annoying, and it's a breath of fresh air tonot have to deal with it in the Classic OS (which I still use on my PowerBook 1400).

Good analogy in your last paragraph.

Charles

dillo - fast, small web browser

From Christopher Richmond

Charles,

I've been reading your columns on Applelinks and and Mac Opinion for years. I always enjoy sitting down with my Powerbook and seeing where the Odyssey will go next.

You seem to like to check out web browsers, so I thought I'd tell you about one that is very small and very fast. It is called Dillo. It is still being developed but for simple web browsing,
it works well and boy is it fast!

You'll find it's home page here:

http://www.dillo.org/

And here is a place you can grab a download to test. Please note that the version that can be downloaded here is a few revisions old. There are newer versions of dillo.

http://www.osxgnu.org/software/Xwin/Applications/dillo/

You need to do a bit of work to be able to run this browser, but I think you may find the effort worth it (did I say that this browser is FAST?)

1) Download and install Apple's X11 app

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/x11formacosx.html

2) Download and install dillo. Take note of which partition
you install it on (I installed in on my data partition)

3) Run the Apple X11 app. If a terminal is not opened when
X11 starts up, go to the 'Applications' menu and choose
terminal. This will open up a terminal window under X11.

4) Run the dillo web browser. Since I installed it on my
data partition. I type the following in my terminal:

/Volumes/data/usr/local/bin/dillo

Give it a try and see what you think.

Take Care,
Chris Richmond

Thanks for the tip, Chris.

I'll see what I can do about checking it out. X11 is terra incognita for me as yet.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM